Clawing to escape the belly of the beast here in Hollywood. To commiserate, email my name assistantatlas at yahoo.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Am I Indecent? HELP!

Dear Lovely Readers,

I haven't asked for help from all of you and I don't plan on making a habit of it. But here's the thing-- you all can see that my ads have been replaced by PSAs. It's not just me, right?

It can't be me, actually. I've checked out my blog several different ways from computers on different ISPs, even different operating systems. Everywhere it's PSAs. So, diligently, I went to GoogleAds support for help. One of the top five FAQ is "Why Am I Getting PSAs?". Helpful, right? Kinda. The only one of the criteria that might possibly apply to me is the following:

"Your page may contain sensitive content for which relevant paying ads will not be displayed."Our system has certain filters in place to protect our advertisers from advertising on pages that could be construed as potentially negative, non-family safe or even offensive. Although the nature of your content may not fit into any of these categories, at times the emphasis of some sensitive subject matters on a page can flag our servers to deliver public service ads to a page.

Okaaaay.... I get the policy and all, but 'non-family safe'? First of all, you totally made up that phrase, GoogleAds. But the real issue is that I'm not getting paid-- just kidding [sort of]. The real issue is that I'm going to have to censor myself to get ads, clean up to get them, find a new ad supplier, figure out a way around the webcrawler algorithms so I'm not potentially negative or offensive or just become a no-revenue-blog.

Here's the thing-- my blog isn't meant to be family-safe. It's got mature themes and I talk about potentially-offensive things all the time. But I have a young, urban, pop-culture-savvy readership that, while small, is growing fast. This is the kind of niche advertisers love-- at least in theory.

So, ARGH! Please, if anyone out there has experience with GoogleAds and indecency, let me know. You can email me at assistantatlas@yahoo.com or just post a comment. What can I do? What should I do? For now, all I can do is sleep, so I'll let you cogitate on this until morning.